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Dec. 2, 2011
Murphy praises Israel
Hillel gala features Canadian commentator.
PAT JOHNSON
On the day that anti-Israel activists attempted to boycott a Vancouver store selling Israeli soap and body products, the Canadian commentator Rex Murphy railed against the irrationality of Israel-bashers in a speech to 300 at Vancouver Hillel’s annual gala Nov. 20.
Murphy, the voice of CBC Radio’s weekly national call-in program Cross Country Checkup, a weekly commentator on CBC Television’s The National and columnist for the National Post, acclaimed the achievements of Israel and the Jewish people and berated opponents.
“You have vastly enriched the human spirit and the human mind. You have seeded the idea of transcendence. You have taught other nations what poetry and language is and, in the present moment, your performance is a combination of valor, of immense competence, of industry, of deep persistence and of bravery and in the smallest portion of this entire world,” said Murphy. “You build a democracy, a place of some respect, and this is the place that idiots who want to boycott a shop want to call apartheid.
“They’re in downtown Vancouver taking a stand,” he said. “This isn’t even funny.”
Murphy credited Hillel students who convinced numerous leading figures, including Dr. David Suzuki, the United Church of Canada and the federal and provincial Green parties, to demand that their names be removed as supporters of the organization that brought the British extremist George Galloway to Canada earlier this year.
“It’s nice they took their names off,” Murphy said. “But what were they doing there in the first place?”
Murphy acknowledged that he came to the issue of Israel late.
“Even though I could go back, obviously, to 1967 very easily, and I had in university Jewish friends and, therefore, inevitable contact with what was going on, I probably studiously kept some distance,” he said. “It seemed so complicated, so ripe and so frenzied that, for a long while, I pushed it off to the side.”
But what he heard in recent years, he said, knocked him off the fence.
“The contrast between what was being presented – what was being said, the passions that were being inflamed, the language that was being used – the distance of all those things to simple reality staggered me. I’m not affecting this. It staggered me. I could not digest it. I could not see how it was that a certain chain of words could be let loose to describe something that was so obviously, so blatantly, intensely, otherwise the case.”
He said a turning point was the launching of Israel Apartheid Weeks on campuses.
“You all know South Africa in the 20th century,” Murphy said. “Even the Newfoundlander knows that, outside of the Nazi regime – I know the power of comparison – but outside of the Nazi regime, there was no more contemptible organization of society, than one built on the idea that a different colored skin made you either lesser a human being or not a human being at all. Apartheid, properly understood, is a mere twin of Nazism in its darkest days, that decreed a genetic inheritance made you vermin. The human mind will not allow you to reach that conclusion ... and yet, here in the inherited enlightenment of the West, we have university campuses – these are the oases of reason, these are our last best hope, this is where we study from Plato and Aristotle to Schopenhauer to the present minute, this is where we train minds in judgment and discrimination and rationality, cause and effect, history, context. How can you possibly extend a cartoon of this ridiculousness and find major support among, not only the students of serious universities, but a good swath of what passes for the intelligentsia of two or three continents?”
Murphy took particular umbrage with the frequent use of Nazi imagery against Israel.
“Is there a possible insult that carries more moral gravity and more civil depravity than to call the descendents of people who suffered torments that are unimaginable, and that can’t even be viewed by the eyes of a spectator 70 years down the road, that we could haul out this ugliest of all political adjectives?” he said. “To what part of the world, to what kind of time, have we come when the generations that so piously cried out, ‘Never again! Never again!’ now can howl at Israeli or Jewish students on a campus that you’re the new jackboots, you’re the new guys with the whips, you’re the guys administering today’s camps. I don’t know what art could come out with an insult that is deeper, that is more malicious and that is more meant to pain and yet, in this world of ours, it’s kind of curious how casually these mendacious and wicked descriptions are shrugged off by the vast majority of people ... It’s staggering because the moral compass that should be really radiating off its own point at the outrage present is simply not there.”
Murphy, whose education was in English, credited Jewish literature for the spark that led to his lifelong love of the language. He mused on Psalm 137.
“This, to me, is one of the glorious phrases,” he said. “It’s as good as Shakespeare at his best when they say, ‘If I forget thee O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget her cunning.’ I don’t know if you feel it the same way that I do but that is so magic a phrase, the right-hand symbolically being the element, the denomination of skill. Cunning! This is not the ape cunning or animalistic. This is the artful skill of dedicated craft and intelligence. This is the greatest possession, this is the artistic impulse. May my right hand forget everything that has transcendent power. May my right hand forget her cunning, if I forget thee, O Jerusalem.”
Murphy wove the biblical back to modern history.
“You ended up, when it came to Israel, and the little spit of land that was given and, in 60 years, you produce a society that runs through Nobel prizes like other people get stuff out of popcorn boxes, you have medicines that you transport to the world, you are first in high-tech, you do things in agriculture, you do things in literature. There is no end and – my God, think of it – all the while, in my judgment, under threat of immediate war and, in some minds, wished-for extinction. In other words, you’re not doing it at summer camp.”
Israel is on the side of reason, he said, while its enemies are driven by something else.
“The animosity toward Jewish people is always stronger,” Murphy said. “I’m not doing this to depress you, really am not, but that is the fundamental one. That’s the one that has continuity. That’s the one that has tradition, that’s the one that is birthed in irrationality and a tremendous energy, what Yeats called the passionate intensity. I can think of no subject that I can scribble a line on, not even that damnable global warming, that will get so immediate and harsh a response as to say something benign about a state as, as I see it, as benign, as Israel.”
He concluded with a speculation.
“If tomorrow morning, every arm, every weapon, every thought of any contest in terms of blood and slaughter with Israel was laid aside completely, if every Palestinian everywhere, said, ‘No, that’s the end of it, not another bullet, not another rocket, not another stick, not another rock, and were going to ask Israel come in and do for us, in partnership, what you did for yourselves’ ... the answer is they would be over there in the afternoon with every piece of machinery and every piece of industry that they could possibly do. If it’s peace you want, we’ll stand side-by-side and we’ll build it,” Murphy said. “And then I asked what would happen if, tomorrow morning, Israel said, ‘Every gun, every jet, every bullet, everything we have, we’re throwing it out, we have nothing here to shoot and nothing here to defend us’ ... I won’t give the answer to this, but I’ll throw it up as a question. What would be the result of that experiment? The rational mind – I know I’m talking to a university audience – that is what finally came to me: that there are things going on in this world that are so hostile to the adjudication of a rational mind and a moral compass that it is intolerable to ignore it and it is demeaning to your own sense of moral well-being not to have some position on it.”
The event, which took place at Riverside Grand Ballroom, was emceed by Dr. Art Hister. The owner of Lavan Body Mind and Soap, Shanie Bar-Oz, the store subject to the boycott attempt, was present and all attendees received a gift from the store, courtesy of a Hillel donor.
Pat Johnson is director of development and communications for the Vancouver Hillel Foundation.
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